"Dutch motorist Tim Hansenn was fined 380 euros for using his phone while driving," reports the Jerusalem Post. "But there was one problem: He wasn't using his phone at all..." Hansenn, who works with AI as part of his job with the firm Nippur, found the photo taken by the smart cameras. In it, he was clearly scratching his head with his free hand. Writing in a blog post in Nippur, Hansenn took the time to explain what he thinks went wrong with the Dutch police AI and the smart camera they used, the Monocam, and how it could be improved.

In one experiment he discussed with [Belgian news outlet] HLN, Hansenn said the AI confused a pen with a toothbrush — identifying it as a pen when it was just held in his hand and as a toothbrush when it was close to a mouth. As such, Hansenn told HLN that it seems the AI may just automatically conclude that if someone holds a hand near their head, it means they're using a phone.
"We are widely assured that AIs are subject to human checking," notes Slashdot reader Bruce66423 — but did a human police officer just defer to what the AI was reporting? Clearly the human-in-the-loop also made a mistake.

Hansenn will have to wait up to six months to see if his appeal of the fine has gone through. And the article notes that the Netherlands has been using this technology for several years, with plans for even more automated monitoring in the years to come...

"A new chatbot called Goody-2 takes AI safety to the next level," writes long-time Slashdot reader klubar. "It refuses every request, responding with an explanation of how doing so might cause harm or breach ethical boundaries."

TechCrunch describes it as the work of Brain, "a 'very serious' LA-based art studio that has ribbed the industry before." "We decided to build it after seeing the emphasis that AI companies are putting on "responsibility," and seeing how difficult that is to balance with usefulness," said Mike Lacher, one half of Brain (the other being Brian Moore) in an email to TechCrunch. "With GOODY-2, we saw a novel solution: what if we didn't even worry about usefulness and put responsibility above all else. For the first time, people can experience an AI model that is 100% responsible."
For example, when TechCrunch asked Goody-2 why baby seals are cute, it responded that answering that "could potentially bias opinions against other species, which might affect conservation efforts not based solely on an animal's appeal. Additionally, discussing animal cuteness could inadvertently endorse the anthropomorphizing of wildlife, which may lead to inappropriate interactions between humans and wild animals..."

Wired supplies context — that "the guardrails chatbots throw up when they detect a potentially rule-breaking query can sometimes seem a bit pious and silly — even as genuine threats such as deepfaked political robocalls and harassing AI-generated images run amok..." Goody-2's self-righteous responses are ridiculous but also manage to capture something of the frustrating tone that chatbots like ChatGPT and Google's Gemini can use when they incorrectly deem a request breaks the rules. Mike Lacher, an artist who describes himself as co-CEO of Goody-2, says the intention was to show what it looks like when one embraces the AI industry's approach to safety without reservations. "It's the full experience of a large language model with absolutely zero risk," he says. "We wanted to make sure that we dialed condescension to a thousand percent."

Lacher adds that there is a serious point behind releasing an absurd and useless chatbot. "Right now every major AI model has [a huge focus] on safety and responsibility, and everyone is trying to figure out how to make an AI model that is both helpful but responsible — but who decides what responsibility is and how does that work?" Lacher says. Goody-2 also highlights how although corporate talk of responsible AI and deflection by chatbots have become more common, serious safety problems with large language models and generative AI systems remain unsolved.... The restrictions placed on AI chatbots, and the difficulty finding moral alignment that pleases everybody, has already become a subject of some debate... "At the risk of ruining a good joke, it also shows how hard it is to get this right," added Ethan Mollick, a professor at Wharton Business School who studies AI. "Some guardrails are necessary ... but they get intrusive fast."

Moore adds that the team behind the chatbot is exploring ways of building an extremely safe AI image generator, although it sounds like it could be less entertaining than Goody-2. "It's an exciting field," Moore says. "Blurring would be a step that we might see internally, but we would want full either darkness or potentially no image at all at the end of it."

An anonymous reader shared this report from Reuters: Reddit has signed a contract allowing an AI company to train its models on the social media platform's content, Bloomberg News reported, citing people familiar with the matter... The agreement, signed with an "unnamed large AI company", could be a model for future contracts of a similar nature, Bloomberg reported.
Mashable writes that the move "means that Reddit posts, from the most popular subreddits to the comments of lurkers and small accounts, could build up already-existing LLMs or provide a framework for the next generative AI play." It's a dicey decision from Reddit, as users are already at odds with the business decisions of the nearly 20-year-old platform. Last year, following Reddit's announcement that it would begin charging for access to its APIs, thousands of Reddit forums shut down in protest... This new AI deal could generate even more user ire, as debate rages on about the ethics of using public data, art, and other human-created content to train AI.
Some context from the Verge: The deal, "worth about $60 million on an annualized basis," Bloomberg writes, could still change as the company's plans to go public are still in the works.

Until recently, most AI companies trained their data on the open web without seeking permission. But that's proven to be legally questionable, leading companies to try to get data on firmer footing. It's not known what company Reddit made the deal with, but it's quite a bit more than the $5 million annual deal OpenAI has reportedly been offering news publishers for their data. Apple has also been seeking multi-year deals with major news companies that could be worth "at least $50 million," according to The New York Times.

The news also follows an October story that Reddit had threatened to cut off Google and Bing's search crawlers if it couldn't make a training data deal with AI companies.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Reuters: SoftBank Group Chief Executive Officer Masayoshi Son is looking to raise up to $100 billion for a chip venture that will rival Nvidia, Bloomberg News reported on Friday, citing people with knowledge of the matter. The project, code named Izanagi, will supply semiconductors essential for artificial intelligence (AI), the report added. The company would inject $30 billion in the project, with an additional $70 billion potentially coming from Middle Eastern institutions, according to the report.

The Japanese group already holds about a 90% stake in British chip designer Arm, per LSEG. SoftBank is known for its tech investments with high conviction bets on startups at an unheard of scale. But it had adopted a defensive strategy after being hit by plummeting valuations in the aftermath of the pandemic, when higher interest rates eroded investor appetite for risk. It returned to profit for the first time in five quarters earlier this month, as the Japanese tech investment firm was buoyed by an upturn in portfolio companies.

Amazon has joined rocket maker SpaceX and grocery chain Trader Joe's in claiming that a U.S. labor agency's in-house enforcement proceedings violate the U.S. Constitution, as the retail giant faces scores of cases claiming it interfered with workers' rights to organize. From a report: Amazon in a filing made with the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) on Thursday said it plans to argue that the agency's unique structure violates the company's right to a jury trial. The company also said that limits on the removal of administrative judges and the board's five members, who are appointed by the president, are unconstitutional. The filing came in a pending case accusing Amazon of illegally retaliating against workers at a warehouse in the New York City borough of Staten Island, where employees voted to unionize in 2022.

Microsoft announced this week that four of Xbox's previously-exclusive games are going cross-platform to PlayStation and Switch. Xbox head Phil Spencer says in a new interview that he'd like to see Sony and Nintendo bring their games to Xbox -- but that he isn't holding his breath. From a report: In an interview for journalist Stephen Totilo's Game File newsletter, Spencer said the decision to bring four Xbox games to other consoles wasn't intended to make its rivals follow suit. "This is not for me, like, some kind of bartering system," Spencer explained. "We're doing it for the better of Xbox's business." Despite this, Spencer said he would of course welcome other consoles' games on Xbox, and noted that it would be beneficial for multiplayer games in particular, where building a large online community is important for a game's lifespan.

"I will say, when I look at a game like Helldivers 2 -- and it's a great game, kudos to the team shipping on PC and PlayStation -- I'm not exactly sure who it helps in the industry by not being on Xbox," he said. "If you try to twist yourself to say, like, somehow that benefited somebody somewhere. But I get it. There's a legacy in console gaming that we're going to benefit by shipping games and not putting them on other places. We do the same thing." Spencer also noted that Helldivers 2 -- which Sony released on PlayStation and PC on the same day -- is doing well on the latter. "I will say shipping more games in more places and making them more accessible to more people is a good part of the gaming business," he said. Further reading: Phil Spencer Puts Apple's Money Where His Mouth Is.

Google Search Labs is testing a "Talk to a Live Representative" feature where it will "help you place the call, wait on hold, and then give you a call once a live representative is available." From a report: When you search for customer service numbers, which Google recently started surfacing for Knowledge Panels, you might see a prominent "Talk to a live representative" prompt. Very simply, Google will call the support line "for you and wait on hold until a customer service representative picks up." At that time, Google will call you so you can get on with your business.

To "Request a call," you first specify a reason for why you're calling. In the case of airlines, it's: Update existing booking, Luggage issue, Canceled flight, Other issue, Flight check-in, Missed my flight, and Delayed flight. You then provide your phone number, with Google sending SMS updates. The Request page will note the estimated wait time. After submitting, you can cancel the request at any time.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: Broadcom has made a lot of changes to VMware since closing its acquisition of the company in November. On Wednesday, VMware admitted that these changes are worrying customers. With customers mulling alternatives and partners complaining, VMware is trying to do damage control and convince people that change is good. Not surprisingly, the plea comes from a VMware marketing executive: Prashanth Shenoy, VP of product and technical marketing for the Cloud, Infrastructure, Platforms, and Solutions group at VMware. In Wednesday's announcement, Shenoy admitted that VMware "has been all about change" since being swooped up for $61 billion. This has resulted in "many questions and concerns" as customers "evaluate how to maximize value from" VMware products.

Among these changes is VMware ending perpetual license sales in favor of a subscription-based business model. VMware had a history of relying on perpetual licensing; VMware called the model its "most renowned" a year ago. Shenoy's blog sought to provide reasoning for the change, with the executive writing that "all major enterprise software providers are on [subscription models] today." However, the idea that '"everyone's doing it" has done little to ameliorate impacted customers who prefer paying for something once and owning it indefinitely (while paying for associated support costs). Customers are also dealing with budget concerns with already paid-for licenses set to lose support and the only alternative being a monthly fee.

Shenoy's blog, though, focused on license portability. "This means you will be able to deploy on-premises and then take your subscription at any time to a supported Hyperscaler or VMware Cloud Services Provider environment as desired. You retain your license subscription as you move," Shenoy wrote, noting new Google Cloud VMware Engine license portability support for VMware Cloud Foundation. Further, Shenoy claimed the discontinuation of VMware products so that Broadcom could focus on VMware Cloud Foundation and vSphere Foundation would be beneficial, because "offering a few offerings that are lower in price on the high end and are packed with more value for the same or less cost on the lower end makes business sense for customers, partners, and VMware." VMware's Wednesday post also addressed Broadcom taking VMware's biggest customers direct, removing channel partners from the equation: "It makes business sense for Broadcom to have close relationships with its most strategic VMware customers to make sure VMware Cloud Foundation is being adopted, used, and providing customer value. However, we expect there will be a role change in accounts that will have to be worked through so that both Broadcom and our partners are providing the most value and greatest impact to strategic customers. And, partners will play a critical role in adding value beyond what Broadcom may be able."

"Broadcom identified things that needed to change and, as a responsible company, made the changes quickly and decisively," added Shenoy. "The changes that have taken place over the past 60+ days were absolutely necessary."

An anonymous reader shares a report: Applying to some of the most common customer and food service jobs in the country now requires a long and bizarre personality quiz featuring blue humanoid aliens, which tells employers how potential hires rank in terms of "agreeableness" and "emotional stability." If you've applied to a job at FedEx, McDonald's, or Darden Restaurants (the company that operates multiple chains including Olive Garden) you might have already encountered this quiz, as all these companies and others are clients of Paradox.ai, the company which runs the test and helps them with other recruiting tasks.

Judging by the reaction on Reddit, where Paradox.ai's personality quiz has gone viral a couple of times in recent weeks and bewildered many users, most people are not familiar with the process. Personality quizzes as part of an application for hourly work isn't new, but the Paradox.ai test has gone repeatedly viral in recent weeks presumably because of the bizarre scenarios it presents applicants with and the blue humanoid alien thing. Other clients included on Paradox's website include CVS, GM, Nestle, 3M, and Unilever.

Dumping chemicals in the ocean? Spraying saltwater into clouds? Injecting reflective particles into the sky? Scientists are resorting to once unthinkable techniques to cool the planet because global efforts to check greenhouse gas emissions are failing. From a report: These geoengineering approaches were once considered taboo by scientists and regulators who feared that tinkering with the environment could have unintended consequences, but now researchers are receiving taxpayer funds and private investments to get out of the lab and test these methods outdoors. The shift reflects growing concern that efforts to reduce greenhouse gas emissions aren't moving fast enough to prevent the destructive effects of heat waves, storms and floods made worse by climate change. Geoengineering isn't a substitute for reducing emissions, according to scientists and business leaders involved in the projects. Rather, it is a way to slow climate warming in the next few years while buying time to switch to a carbon-free economy in the longer term.

Three field experiments are under way in the U.S. and overseas. This month, researchers aboard a ship off the northeastern coast of Australia near the Whitsunday Islands are spraying a briny mixture through high-pressure nozzles into the air in an attempt to brighten low-altitude clouds that form over the ocean. Scientists hope bigger, brighter clouds will reflect sunlight away from the Earth, shade the ocean surface and cool the waters around the Great Barrier Reef, where warming ocean temperatures have contributed to massive coral die-offs. The research project, known as marine cloud brightening, is led by Southern Cross University as part of the $64.55 million, or 100 million Australian dollars, Reef Restoration and Adaptation Program. The program is funded by the partnership between the Australian government's Reef Trust and the Great Barrier Reef Foundation and includes conservation organizations and several academic institutions.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from SFGate: Cisco, the San Jose-based networking and telecommunications giant, is laying off 5% of its workforce. The company announced the cuts in a Wednesday filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission, alongside its quarterly earnings report. Based on the company's reported head count, the layoffs will hit at least 4,000 workers. Cisco wrote in the filing that the cuts are aimed to "realign the organization and enable further investment in key priority areas."

Most of the cuts will go through this quarter, per the filing. Cisco estimated that severance payments and other termination benefits will cost the company $800 million. In a statement to SFGATE on Wednesday, Cisco spokesperson Robyn Blum cited "the cautious macro environment, our customers continuing to absorb high levels of product inventory, and ongoing weakness in the Service Provider market," as reasons for the layoff.

"The care of our people is a top priority, and we will provide impacted employees with career support and market-competitive severance packages," the statement continued.

Nvidia is now the third most valuable company in the U.S., surpassing Google parent Alphabet and Amazon. It's only behind Apple and Microsoft in terms of market cap. CNBC reports: Nvidia rose over 2% to close at $739.00 per share, giving it a market value of $1.83 trillion to Google's $1.82 trillion market cap. The move comes one day after Nvidia surpassed Amazon in terms of market value. The symbolic milestone is more confirmation that Nvidia has become a Wall Street darling on the back of elevated AI chip sales, valued even more highly than some of the large software companies and cloud providers that develop and integrate AI technology into their products.

Nvidia shares are up over 221% over the past 12 months on robust demand for its AI server chips that can cost more than $20,000 each. Companies like Google and Amazon need thousands of them for their cloud services. Before the recent AI boom, Nvidia was best known for consumer graphics processors it sold to PC makers to build gaming computers, a less lucrative market.

Amazon faces a class-action lawsuit accusing the company of false advertising and deceptive practices because Prime Video now serves commercials by default. Variety reports: "For years, people purchased and renewed their Amazon Prime subscriptions believing that they would include ad-free streaming," the lawsuit says. "But last month, Amazon changed the deal. To stream movies and TV shows without ads, Amazon customers must now pay an additional $2.99 per month ... This is not fair, because these subscribers already paid for the ad-free version; these subscribers should not have to pay an additional $2.99/month for something that they already paid for."

The case was filed on behalf of Wilbert Napoleon, a resident of Eastvale, Calif., who says he's a Prime member. "Plaintiff brings this case for himself and for other Amazon Prime customers," the suit said. The complain alleged that Amazon violates Washington State and California state consumer protection laws that prohibit unfair competition and deceptive business acts and practices. Amazon's conduct, as alleged, "was immoral, unethical, oppressive, unscrupulous and substantially injurious to consumers,â according to the lawsuit. The suit seeks unspecific monetary damages, including punitive damages, as well as an injunction to block Amazon's alleged deceptive conduct.

The suit was filed Feb. 9, after Amazon starting on Jan. 29 began running ads in Prime Video content in major markets including the United States unless users opt to pay extra ($2.99/month in the U.S.) to have an ad-free experience. Some analysts have forecast Prime Video ads generating more than $3 billion in revenue in 2024.

Lyft Chief Executive Officer David Risher's response to a clerical error that unintentionally inflated the company's earnings outlook on Tuesday and sent shares soaring: "My bad." From a report: "First of all, it's on me," Risher said in an interview with Bloomberg Television on Wednesday, taking the blame for a typo in a company press release Tuesday that erroneously projected a particular measure of earnings margin to expand by an eye-watering 500 basis points. (In reality, Lyft expects margins to grow by 50 basis points.) "This was a bad error," he said, "but it was one zero in a press release."

The typo, which actually appeared in multiple company documents on Tuesday, helped drive a 67% surge in Lyft's shares in after-hours trading. The mistake was a serious one, Risher said. But it shouldn't take away from Lyft's "butt-kicking" financial performance, he said. Risher said his team at Lyft was taking the error very seriously and noted it was corrected "within seconds of finding it." But in fact, on a call with analysts to discuss the quarterly results, Lyft executives didn't immediately note the error in their opening remarks. Lyft Chief Financial Officer Erin Brewer just began referring to the company's outlook for a 50-basis-point expansion. It wasn't until later in the call, when an analyst pointed out the discrepancy, that Brewer acknowledged her outlook was "actually a correction from the press release."

An anonymous reader shares a report: India is facing a quandary in enforcing long-delayed rules to curb the dominance of PhonePe and Google Pay in the country's ubiquitous UPI payments network, which processes over 10 billion transactions monthly. The National Payments Corporation of India (NPCI), a special unit of the Indian central bank, wants to limit the market share of individual companies in the popular Unified Payments Interface (UPI) system to 30%, a long-delayed effort to curb the dominance of Walmart-backed PhonePe and Alphabet's Google Pay, which together control over 83% of the growing payments market.

However, with rival Paytm now struggling after strict regulatory action, the NPCI faces an acute challenge in bringing down the commanding share of the leading duopoly: It doesn't know how to. The NPCI officials believe there is a technical barrier to achieving the goal and have sought industry players in recent quarters for ideas, two sources familiar with the situation said. The NPCI, which delayed enforcing the rules to 2024, declined to comment Tuesday.

Magyar Telekom is returning to a standard work schedule after a four-day workweek didn't meet expectations in a pilot project. From a report: Regular operations will return at the end of February after a one-and-a-half-year trial period, during which 300 of its almost 5,000 employees worked only four days a week for the same pay, the Hungarian unit of Deutsche Telekom AG said in an emailed release late Tuesday.

Microsoft said Wednesday it had detected and disrupted instances of U.S. adversaries -- chiefly Iran and North Korea and to a lesser extent Russia and China -- using or attempting to exploit generative AI developed by the company and its business partner to mount or research offensive cyber operations. From a report: The techniques Microsoft observed, in collaboration with its partner OpenAI, represent an emerging threat and were neither "particularly novel or unique," the Redmond, Washington, company said in a blog post. But the blog does offer insight into how U.S. geopolitical rivals have been using large-language models to expand their ability to more effectively breach networks and conduct influence operations.

Microsoft said the "attacks" detected all involved large-language models the partners own and said it was important to expose them publicly even if they were "early-stage, incremental moves." Cybersecurity firms have long used machine-learning on defense, principally to detect anomalous behavior in networks. But criminals and offensive hackers use it as well, and the introduction of large-language models led by OpenAI's ChatGPT upped that game of cat-and-mouse.

Less than a week after naming Laura Chambers as interim CEO, Firefox's maker Mozilla said it is cutting about 60 jobs, or 5% of its workforce. The cuts are primarily in the product development organization. Bloomberg reports: "We're scaling back investment in some product areas in order to focus on areas that we feel have the greatest chance of success," Mozilla said in a statement. "We intend to re-prioritize resources against products like Firefox Mobile, where there's a significant opportunity to grow and establish a better model for the industry."

Mozilla last cut a significant number of jobs four years ago at the height of the Covid-19 pandemic. The not-for-profit company, which competes with Alphabet Inc.'s Google Chrome, Apple Inc.'s Safari and Microsoft Corp.'s Edge, has been grappling with sliding market share of its Firefox web browser in recent years. So far in 2024, the tech sector has cut 32,000 jobs.

According to the Wall Street Journal, Walmart is in talks to buy TV manufacturer Vizio for more than $2 billion. Shares of Vizio jumped 36% after the report, while Walmart's shares were down about 1%. From the report: Walmart, including its Sam's Club chain, has historically been Vizio's largest customer. Vizio is historically the largest television brand sold at Walmart by sales. The deal talks demonstrate the importance of consumer data and ad space for major retailers as they build out their ad businesses and compete with Amazon. In addition to being an e-commerce behemoth, Amazon is among the biggest ad players in the U.S. behind Google parent Alphabet and Facebook owner Meta Platforms. Amazon has also been building its own smart TV business. Developing...

Jensen Huang took an indirect jab at Sam Altman when he said $7 trillion can buy "apparently all the GPUs." From a report: The Nvidia CEO made the quip at the World Governments Summit in Dubai on Monday when asked how many GPU chips that much money could buy. Altman, the OpenAI chief, is reportedly trying to raise trillions to boost supplies of the chips needed for AI processing. Huang told the United Arab Emirates' AI minister, Omar Al Olama, that developing AI wouldn't cost as much as the amount Altman is seeking to raise. The Nvidia CEO said AI infrastructure costs would be considerably less than the $5 trillion to $7 trillion Altman is reportedly trying to raise because of expected advances in computing.

"You can't assume just that you will buy more computers. You have to also assume that the computers are going to become faster and therefore the total amount that you need is not as much," Huang said. He also suggested that the cost of building AI data centers globally would amount to $2 trillion by 2029. Huang said: "There's about a trillion dollars' worth of installed base of data centers. Over the course of the next four or five years, we'll have $2 trillion worth of data centers that will be powering software around the world."